A single unbranched black coral stem, and the reason to look at empty water on a slope.
A black coral that grows as a single unbranched stem, straight or coiled, up to about three metres long, anchored to rock and rising into the current. The skeleton is dark and horny; the living tissue over it is usually green-brown, yellow or red, and the polyps sit in a row along one or both sides. Despite the name, black corals are named for the skeleton, not the animal.
Almost nothing about the whip itself makes a photograph, and almost everything on it does: the whip coral shrimp and the whip coral goby are found on individual stems and nowhere else, both are transparent and both take the colour of their host, and the usual method is to run a light slowly along a whip from the base and watch for a shadow that moves. Recorded from about 5 to 50 m, and more numerous on the current-exposed side of a slope.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
